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NEWS Blockchain Conference review
Senior Reporter Alex Hamilton
For the third year running, the Blockchain Conference was held during London Blockchain Week, a series of events, workshops, hackathons, meetups and parties that took place during January
seemingly fully-formed as a way to replace age-old systems and its potential has people reeling. Following a weekend hackathon, a packed conference programme split itself up into a main industry stream featuring use cases, banks and other financial applications and a technology stream focussed on the activities of developers and pure blockchain companies. While a number of luminaries, including Stephan Tual of Ethereum fame, made an appearance, the sessions were populated by smaller-scale companies.
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The UK’s financial scene might be wringing its hands after Brexit but that hasn’t stopped London from being seen as a go-to city for blockchain companies. Guido Branca, CEO of BABB, told audiences that the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority had turned the UK into an ideal place for innovation.
“We actually chose to come to the UK to open this bank because of the regulators,” said Branca. “We looked around the world – at Europe and most of the United States – to see which regulators would be open to looking at new ways of implementing banking using blockchain, and we found that both the FCA and the Bank of England are taking a very open approach.” Instead of “turning people away” regulators in the UK are engaging with and trying to learn from them.
Griffin Anderson, Head of Blockchain Accounting at Consensys, said that 2018 would be the “breakout year”. Firm will start putting solutions into practice next year
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he technology behind Bitcoin has emerged
and each will have different blockchains for different processes. “Almost all” Fortune 500 companies will have business practices that can be transformed using the technology, added Anderson.
Megan Reynolds, Business Development Manager at Crowdcube, agreed that blockchain is “an amazing technology”, but stressed that it is still in very early stages of development. Companies are busy working on how, not where to implement it. Richard Muirhead, General Partner at OpenOcean, noted that “it takes a lot of work and luck” to find a proper combination of features. “It’s as much about what you leave out as what you include.”
There was more than a little effort being made to dispel the dark legends of the past – the potential that the technology has for both public and private companies was in full show. The list of speakers and attendees included Save the Children UK, the Open Music Initiative and UNICEF-associated DonerCoin.
Save the Children has teamed up with Bitnation to assist refugees, assigning a blockchain-based ID to each new arrival with the goal of providing each and every one with some form of banking service or support. Bitnation has also worked on projects in Estonia logging marriages on the blockchain, as well as offering LGBT weddings via the service in countries where it’s illegal.
DonerCoin, the brainchild of Founder Rudi Kruger, also presented on how the blockchain can aid in the securing of funds sent to developing countries. Corruption in such
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